Distribution of video information over networks, such as a wide area distribution network (i.e., the Internet), involves encapsulating raw video into a streaming format that is suitable for transmission over the network. For example, the raw video may be in a MPEG format, such as an MPEG2-transport stream (MPEG2-TS) and it is desirable to produce a real-time transport protocol (RTP) stream that is compatible with the RFC3550 standard. This is an important task as many of existing headend equipment deployments cannot output RTP streams. However, telecommunication service providers need the RTP encapsulation function in order to serve advanced features for improving video quality experience. Therefore, the service providers are required to perform RTP encapsulation somewhere in the network before secondary distribution.
It is often desirable to have redundant (and identical) copies of the video stream so that the end-to-end system does not have a single point of failure. A video encoder (with N−1 redundancy) has two Ethernet outputs, feeding two encapsulator devices. The encapsulator devices are not able to generate identical streams because the RTP identifiers such as the sequence numbers and timestamps are not coordinated between the devices. Different encapsulator devices may produce totally different streams even for the same content.